The Memory Tree

by Tess Evans

  Praise for Book of Lost Threads

  ‘. . . charming, full of tenderness and compassion and gentle humour . . .’ Adelaide Advertiser

  ‘There is genuine care, concern and love between the four main characters and when each of their problems comes to a head they all band together in support . . . a strong and intricate plot . . .’ Good Reading

  ‘In this highly engaging and compassionate novel, [Tess Evans] successfully realises her evident ambition to salute the bravery of the small souls of this world.’ The Age

  ‘There are many layers to this engaging debut—all expertly woven together. One to pass on to your friends.’ Who Weekly

  ‘Tess Evans has written a charming novel, bringing together, in a small country town, four disparate characters . . . their combined strength, their reliance upon each other, their warm friendship and their thoughtfulness had given them the wisdom to weave those lost threads back into the tapestry of their lives.’ Ballarat Courier

  ‘All their stories are told with skilful flashbacks, and a warm understanding of hopes, dreams and kindness. Make friends with these special people.’ Woman’s Day

  ‘Evans wants to show the best of humanity . . . Book of Lost Threads deserves to be enjoyed by many readers.’ Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘. . . wonderfully written, creating a complexity and sense of place that makes this journey toward redemption an enjoyable one.’ Bookseller &Publisher

  ‘. . . storytelling at its most adept.’ Canberra Times

  ‘Told with tenderness and humour it’s a book to make you laugh and cry.’ Pittwater Life

  The

  Memory

  Tree

  TESS EVANS

  First published in 2012

  Copyright © Tess Evans 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, London

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74237 789 6

  Internal design by Brittany Britten

  Set in 11.5/15 pt Adobe Caslon by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To a much loved lady,

  my mother, Alice Websdale

  O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?

  —W.B. Yeats, ‘Among School Children’

  Contents

  Genesis

  Book I

  Book II

  Book III

  Exodus

  Genesis

  IN A CENTRE OF STILLNESS, the magnolia.

  And around the twilit garden, there are lanterns in the trees—Chinese lanterns, glowing a secret, Oriental orange, and perfume from the trellis-climbing jasmine—white and yellow stars that fill the dusky corners of the garden, heady with scent and promise. And interlaced with the music, the disembodied cicada song, proclaiming the heat-to-come; and the thick summer air, like fog, like will-o’-the-wisp, enveloping the figures on the lawn, drawing beads of sweat on foreheads and breasts, staining cotton shirts and silk dresses, as the dancers sway and drink and sing and sway and drink and sing until, with a soft exhalation, they fall gracefully, one by one, onto the lawn and the scattered wicker chairs.

  And all the while Sealie sees herself from afar, part of the crowd but a distant spectator. How beautiful they all are. How beautiful is she, in her flowing yellow silk with her storm-cloud hair and lustrous grey eyes.

  Sealie sees it all again from the front window of the old house. Sees it all and remembers how even then, that night, she had sensed herself watching and knows now that this was that moment, frozen in time, spanning the years between young, hopeful, full of hope Sealie and the unhappy woman she’d become. She wants to close her eyes, to leave, but the phantom figures continue their dance and she’s compelled to stay and finally to weep, not in sorrow, not in remorse, but in anger and frustration.

  I regard her, my poor Aunt Sealie, as she remembers her youthful self and weeps. To be honest, I have more to weep about than she does, but I do pity her. How could I not?

  As the last spirit slips away, Sealie absently strokes the silk of a phantom yellow dress, then stands, straightens her shoulders and goes to the kitchen to prepare my father’s medication. He’s on Zoloft at the moment. She warms some milk and adds a jam biscuit to the saucer—child food for a grown man, but he likes his bedtime milk. It helps him sleep.

  ‘Here’s your milk, Zav,’ she says, and watches him take the pill. My poor dad; melancholy, gaunt, once-handsome Zav, sitting up in bed, in his striped jammies, watching another episode of Law and Order. My poor aunt, her narrow hips beginning to spread in her easy-fit jeans, hovering, hands twisting, is ensuring that he won’t hide the pill under his tongue. He can only do that for so long until it dissolves, so she always waits a finely calibrated number of minutes. It’s a game they play. He knows why she’s waiting, so he swallows, opens his mouth, lifts his tongue and turns back to the television.

  She pauses at the door. ‘Zav?’

  ‘Mmm?’ He doesn’t want to talk. The show’s at a crucial point.

  ‘Today, do you remember what . . .’ He’s engrossed in the flickering screen. ‘Today . . .’ She doesn’t complete her sentence. She didn’t really intend to.

  What she was going to say, of course, was that it’s his wedding anniversary. She stops herself in time. She always does. The problem is that this day, so painful to him now, was the highlight of her life.

  Despite their exotic names, Selina and Xavier Rodriguez, as fourth-generation Australians, inevitably became known as Sealie and Zav. They were born into a well-off, even rich family, who had migrated from Peru seeking gold in the rush of the 1850s, but found their El Dorado in the growing of fine wool. Their father’s given name was Heraldo, but this was quickly shortened to the less pretentious Hal. He was an only child, inheriting a significant fortune from his father who had diversified into textiles and printing. Their mother, Paulina, a fragile beauty, had been in the corps de ballet when Hal swept her off her tiny, accomplished and oh-so-painful feet, to life in a leafy Melbourne suburb. There, with the help of a housekeeper, she made a charming home for Hal and their two pretty children.

  Teeth like pearls another saying goes, but it was Paulina’s eyes that were like grey pearls. Large and luminescent, they stared back at her from her children’s faces, so that sometimes the extravagant Hal would call them, his family, his precious string of pearls. The first thing Grandfather Hal said when he saw me was, She has eyes just like Paulina. My mother wasn’t much pleased. Fair enough, too. After nine months of pregnancy and a difficult labour, she felt she was entitled to first dibs on my genetic makeup.

  The Rodriguez family
was blessed. Everyone said so. Zav was the first born, a bonny babe who grew into a handsome, smiling five-year-old, with long, straight limbs and a natural niceness and charm that won over women of all ages. But don’t infer from this that my father was a ‘mummy’s boy’. Oh no. He was good at sport and a natural leader, with a sense of adventure. More’s the pity, really, considering where it led. Their lives, as I said, were blessed, and just when Hal and Paulina had given up on a sibling for Zav, Sealie was conceived.

  Hal and Paulina were delighted to find that their second child was a girl.

  ‘A pigeon pair,’ cooed their housekeeper, Mrs McLennon. ‘What more could anyone ask?’

  What more, indeed?

  Paulina was a woman who kissed and hugged her children at every opportunity. In fact, she couldn’t bear to be near them without touching them. She stroked their hair with absent-minded fondness; she squeezed their shoulders; she cupped their chins and kissed the tips of their noses. She’d dance and sing with them or tickle them until they all fell into a giggling heap on the sofa.

  As Zav became a serious young boy, no longer a little boy, Hal began to have misgivings. He saw it as his job to protect his son’s maleness. He was, after all, surrounded by doting women. ‘We have to be careful not to turn the boy into a sissy,’ he said.

  Paulina’s grey eyes darkened and she held his gaze with a fierceness he had never experienced before. ‘Children need to know they’re loved,’ she said.

  Hal flinched at the reproach and never mentioned the subject again. He simply couldn’t bear the thought of quarrelling with Paulina.

  Despite her response, Paulina was aware that Zav could not be her baby forever, but she continued her tactile mothering in subtle ways: brushing the hair from his eyes, hugging him briefly after straightening his collar, holding his shoulders as she looked over his homework. And she always expected (and got) a goodnight or goodbye kiss.

  Those were happy years. Productive years. Hal grew his various businesses and after the children were in bed, he’d sit with Paulina as they listened to the wireless or read the newspapers. He always made her evening cup of tea.

  ‘What do we pay Mrs McLennon for?’ she sometimes said as Hal came in with the tray.

  ‘I like to make you tea,’ Hal would respond, crestfallen. ‘I just like doing things for you.’

  ‘Silly boy,’ she’d say, pulling him to her and kissing his ear. ‘Now, if you insist on being a skivvy, what about a biscuit?’ And Hal would hurry out to the kitchen where Mrs Mac was preparing to go home.

  ‘Thanks for making the tea, Mr R,’ the housekeeper had called out once, but seeing Hal’s embarrassment, never mentioned it again. Mrs R liked everyone in their place and Mrs McLennon, a widow not much older than her employers, took to her role with a hausfrau demeanour and sober responsibility that belied her age.

  Saturdays were for Sealie’s ballet lessons and Zav’s sport, and on Sundays the family went to church before sitting down to roast lamb with all the trimmings. Hal loved carving the roast, using the finely honed knife his father had given him when they were first married. It sliced through the tender meat as though it were butter.

  Hal’s father, Paolo, had been a severe man, with very firm ideas about the discipline of children. Children should be seen and not heard, he’d roar. And I’m not even sure they should be seen.

  The first time he said this, Hal’s mother snickered, thinking it was a joke.

  She was soon put right. ‘I’ll thank you not to undermine me, Elizabeth,’ he said. And sensible to the reprimand, she fell silent.

  She was mostly silent. Hal remembered his mother as a timid woman who looked to her husband for direction in everything. For instance, there was the last time she hugged him. His unfading memory was of himself, maybe four or five years old—a small boy with huge brown eyes and an impish grin which soon disappeared as his father entered the room.

  ‘It’s time you stopped mollycoddling the boy,’ he said. ‘He must kiss you on the cheek. No more.’ From then on, Elizabeth silently presented her cheek at bedtime and Hal gave her a dutiful peck. He never knew if it hurt her, this cold facsimile of affection. But then, as he always said, he grew up alright in the end.

  One good outcome of his father’s child-rearing theories was that Hal was free to trawl the neighbourhood for fun and adventure. His imagination was fertile and he led a motley gang of children who climbed trees, made cubbyhouses, billycarts and canoes; who stole fruit from neighbours’ trees and terrorised the local cats, wielding their shanghais with deadly accuracy. The gang were all boys, of course. With a mother who was a cipher, no sisters, and no female friends, Hal grew up with the idea that women were mysterious creatures, too delicate for the rough and tumble of the real world.

  When Hal turned twenty-one, his father took out his knife and showed him how to sharpen the blade and carve the roast. He saw it as a rite of passage.

  They sat on the back porch and Hal watched while his father whetted the knife.

  ‘Long, easy strokes,’ the older man said. ‘There’s a rhythm, you see.’

  Hal’s eyes were fixed on his father’s hands. The long, strong fingers. The hair on his head is turning grey, but the hairs on his hands are still black. Funny. He’d never noticed the ropey veins either.

  ‘Now,’ Paolo was saying. ‘Now I’ll show you how to carve.’

  The joint was brown and juicy and the knife revealed its tender pink centre. Paolo cut delicately, with almost surgical precision, until the white bone was neatly exposed.

  Hal watched, fascinated and fearful, feeling his own body’s kinship with meat and bone. He ran his tongue over dry lips and shook off the thought.

  ‘. . . so you can have a go next time,’ his father was saying. ‘You’re a man now and when you have a family of your own, you’ll be prepared.’

  Hal accepted this—but really, what an odd thing to say!

  Mrs Mac reckons you shouldn’t give a knife as a gift. That it cuts through the friendship. To be honest, I don’t think my grandfather and great-grandfather had a friendship to cut through. Nevertheless, Hal was quite moved when Paolo gave him the knife. It was the first and only present his father ever gave him.

  When he carved the roast for his own family, Hal looked forward to the time when he would pass on the skill to his own son. Continuity is so important. And family is the ultimate in continuity. He always counted his blessings at these moments. Across the table sat his strong, handsome son and beside him, that merry-eyed little girl, his daughter, often giggling at something her brother had said. And by his side, always by his side, his beautiful wife, smiling at her children before turning to him with that secret, loving look. Hal’s happiness was complete. That look was for him alone.

  So there you have it. My forebears—and the beginning of my tale. How much, I wonder, is buried in our genes and how much are we shaped by our experiences? As far as I can see, we are dealt our cards at birth and our task is to play them as best we can. The cards dealt to my family were a mixture of good and bad—but I guess that’s the way things usually work.

  Me? I’m an observer, trying to make sense of the game, to explain why some cards were played well and others so badly. I’ll try to be dispassionate, but if I sometimes lapse into personal commentary, you’ll have to forgive me. It’s the story of my family, after all. And I’m only human.

  Even as a young man, Hal’s behaviour could sometimes be described as slightly manic. No-one called it that at the time, although with hindsight, everyone had instances they could recall. At the time, they spoke only of his enthusiasms, his amusing obsessions, his spontaneity. All rather endearing. All quite harmless. And it was Paulina, calm and sweet, who came to provide the grounding he needed.

  They met at a party—a commonplace beginning for such a golden pair. Hal called himself Heraldo, then—he thought it sounded swashbuckling. But Hal or Heraldo, he always said it was love at first sight. Another cliché, but I can’t be held respo
nsible for my grandfather’s linguistic failures.

  Hal was slightly drunk, and in his uninhibited way, was demonstrating variations of a dance that in later years was called the Limbo, when he fell flat on his back and looked up to see two disapproving grey eyes looking down at him.

  ‘She tells me that it wasn’t that I was drunk, just that I was clumsy,’ he would say, looking fondly at his smiling wife. ‘How did my graceful little swan end up with a big lumbering fellow like me?’ he’d go on to ask, knowing that she loved to feel herself safe in his huge embrace, safe in his huge love for her.

  At this first meeting, though, he found her stare disconcerting and challenged her to do better. Smiling, she obliged, bending her supple body back so that her head almost touched the floor. The other party goers cheered and jeered, but Hal didn’t hear them. In his impulsive way, he’d already fallen head over heels in love. Literally, was his rueful thought as he rubbed his bruised backside and graciously acknowledged defeat.

  Leaving the theatre the next evening, the young dancer found a coat flung gallantly over a puddle that had accumulated at the foot of the steps. She tried to ignore the crooked grin of the crazy young man attached to the coat, but felt her lips twitch in response. Encouraged by this ghost of a smile, Hal next trundled a portable record player to her flat and played ‘Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart’ at full volume. He got as far as I still recall the thrill before abuse drowned out the music as Paulina cringed under the bedclothes. The next morning she was embarassed to find a record player abandoned in a wheelbarrow under her window.

  ‘You couldn’t even serenade me yourself?’ she asked, outraged, when he met her at the stage door that night.

  ‘Not good enough,’ he explained. ‘And I didn’t want to put you off.’

  ‘Put me off! It was lucky they didn’t put me out on the street in my nightdress!’